Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

How many troops? Twelve hundred regulars, fourteen thousand irregulars?

The Pentagon group had calculated that the country couldn’t withstand many more attacks in the mode of the Disney World Horror, and that they might happen even if the U.S. policy in the Middle East changed a lot-which it wouldn’t. And no conventional means could stop them. So they began to fund research on speculative systems that might be able to affect a situation without touching it, or redirect it once had started. Over the last ten years, they had funded nearly a hundred speculative research projects-disintegrator rays, antigravity, telekinesis, atmospheric shielding, weather control, and so on-and only a few of them, notably ASP, ever worked out.

They reasoned that they’d never be able to completely stop terrorists from getting into a jet and taking it over, but that once they’ve seen the jet is heading for a given target, they might be able to get into the terrorist pilot’s head and make him reroute it-even in the last couple of seconds.

Then, it became clear that there might not even be time to do that-but that it might be possible to send signals or even consciousnesses into that terrorist’s head at a moment in the recent past. This wouldn’t affect anything up until the time you sent the signal, of course-but it could give you enough leeway to change what that terrorist would do later on, beginning the moment after the signal was sent.

And, of course, the project grew from there. And grew, and grew.

Okay. Time for that call. I touched PIC. Marena’s head and shoulders came up.

“Hi, friend,” her head said. “I stopped for slushies. And I have to do a few things. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.” I said great and managed to stay expressionless. She disappeared herself. The Windows status bar said it was already 5:11:23 P.M.

Okay. Let’s do the hustle.

Order something. I clicked up ParkShop and after a little thrashing around I picked out a few needful things from Lobel Brothers’ Prime Kosher Provisions and the New Prana Botanica and Balducci’s South and a few other places and prepaid them on Marena’s Mall number. Instead of using Marena’s delivery service I clicked up Pink Dot-it’s this really fast high-end driving-and-errand place we used to use a lot in the Kings-and sent them the list. You really can get almost anything almost anywhere without even speaking to anybody. A mosquito-how’d it get in here? — passed between me and the screen and I grabbed and crushed it. Under my breath I said sorry to Greatfather Mosquito and, just for good measure, to the whole Mosquito clan. I ZPZFZPP!! ed some shmutz off the pyramid with Marena’s beloved Dust-Off. I sat back down. I took the precious Kleenex out of my pocket and unwrapped it. I took off my sweatshirt, found some Centrix scissors, and cut off the cuff. I pushed the Kleenex down into one glass and the cuff down into another and poured in just enough water to cover them. I watched them soak for a while, mushed each of them around with a pen cap, and watched some more.

Okay. Dosage. Maybe just drink the whole thing. There’s no way to tell, anyway. The stuff’s different now. Maybe it had lost its kick. I’m different. I’m probably nearly twice as heavy. On the other hand, maybe the Greathouse families had built up such an immunity to this stuff over the centuries that now even a little taste would kill me.

Face it, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll have to just do it by taste. Trust the Force.

I sat and thought for a hundred beats.

I put the emergency nurse call button near my good hand just in case. Okay. I opened my water carafes. One of them was hot water for a selection of muslin-bagged teas. I set my two original tumblers on the cart, away from the drug infusions, and filled each glass with water. There was a salt shaker near the food tray and I poured half of it into each glass and stirred it up. Okay.

If I felt like I was in trouble, I was going to punch the call button, drink the first glass of saline solution, “induce vomiting,” as they say, all over the floor, and then drink the second glass. Then I’d yell for a nurse.

I rehearsed it a couple of times in my head. Okay.

I took two Styrofoam cups off the cart, squeezed half the scorpion tincture into one and half the orb weaver stuff into the other, and drank them both. The scorpion fluid only had a numbing taste, but the spider essence rang that blue-ambergris taste up into my sinuses and back into my Eustachian tubes, and it was like I could feel Koh stroking me and telling me not to worry in that soft Chol as the neurotoxins ratcheted in my inner ears.

I opened the DHI driver program. I needed a password and I just clicked through it, KCAJ/ZENOBIA/1132. I didn’t have to figure it out, I just remembered the patterns of Marena’s fingers on her phone from the night before, although ordinarily I wouldn’t be able to do something like that. The stuff was already getting to me.

I looked through all her work. She’d saved about ten copies of each version of the Sacrifice Game we’d played since I’d been back, and each one had a different silly name. At first I couldn’t find the current model but finally I clicked up something called Molly Niven’s Ringworm and it turned out to be an automatic backup of everything we’d worked on when we’d played the Game a few days ago, including the setup of Koh’s last position. It took me another twenty-score beats to get it going. Marena definitely hadn’t made it easy for me. I felt like Bluebeard’s eighth wife, turning forbidden doorknobs and listening for a creak on the stairs.

There was a little bar graph on the phone interface and I moved it halfway to the right. The difference was like how things looked when I first got two eyes back again. The pyramid-world seemed to get bigger somehow, except it didn’t actually grow, its edges were still in the same place, and I could still see the room around it, but it was like I’d risen up in this secret dirigible sky fortress and I was looking down through at this vast multilayered mesa-pyramid Game-pueblo through my ultra-high-power Master of the World Giant Brass Telescope. I moved my finger a few millimeters to the right again and without losing clarity I was another fifty or so kilometers above ground level and the city had expanded to the scale of a mountain range. It was like that Vertigo effect, where you track the movie camera forward while you zoom the lens down from telephoto to extreme wide-angle. I got my finger on the part of the table that worked like a joystick, and I leaned closer and moved my point of view down and in, and it was like I was diving at a more-than-possible acceleration and I could feel my pituitary gland pumping adrenaline and tightened my grip on the edge of the table, but at the same time I was still totally aware that I was sitting on a hospital bed. In fact, if anything I was more aware than usual of how my body was part of the world. Marena’s design was all spare, like an idealized city by Piero della Francesca, but it was also homey somehow, like you wanted to live there. It was something about how every part implied every other part, it made it like a real place, or the essence of place, it had that particularity that places had in the old days or when you were a child, before you could see how the Plasticland strip-mall grid had tightened around the world. A beat before I hit the green center of the mul I pulled back and there was an instant of stillness right over the apex as my parabolic course reached its nadir, and then I wafted back up over the courts and floated below the hard turquoise shell of the sky like I was in an upside-down Great Salt Lake.

Rapraprap. Another nurse-knock.

“Mr. Sic?” She pronounced it like “sick.”